Wednesday, 2 December 2015

Ten Other Great Songs By... Kirsty MacColl!

I’ve been meaning to start
doing these for a while now as a less ‘image intensive’ option for when I’m
feeling lazy.

I know a lot about music,
but I know an especially large amount about a selection of 12 or so artists (maybe
even more) – I have their whole discography, books on them and so on, they’re
mostly British acts you mostly haven’t heard of that you mostly wouldn’t think
I’d listen to if you saw me on the street (except The Clash, and the Manic
Street Preachers – you’d defiantly think I listen to the Manics if you met me) but
they usually had one or two hits most people in Britain have heard, even if
it’s just on an advert with the words changed to advertise microwave food or
credit cards or whatever. Case in point: Kirsty MacColl who’s known for jangly
guitars, Cuban influences and singing on a song by a bunch of Irishmen, not the
sort of act one would expect a big Metalhead looking fellow to obsess over, but
obsess I do. So I’ve decided to write these posts, where I eschew the one or
two hits the act has to tell you about 10 other great songs they recorded.

Kirsty MacColl is sadly
mostly known via other people’s work – she’s the female voice on The Pogues’
Christmas hit ‘Fairytale of New York’1 (the bells are ringing out
for Christmas Day etc etc) and the writer of They Don’t Know which was a hit
for Tracy Ulman (she also sung back-up on that) while two of her three biggest
chart successes in the UK were cover versions – of The Kink’s Days and Billy
Bragg’s A New England. To make matters worse her biggest hit was the brilliant
‘There’s A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ which got her lumped
in categories like ‘novelty song’ and ‘one-hit wonder’ (she wasn’t, she had
several Top 10 hits). I say ‘sadly’ and ‘it only makes matters worse’ not just
because it ruins one’s credibility to be considered a covers act, a novelty act
or a one-hit wonder but of those the only song that showed off her talents as a
snappy lyricist is the one that everyone ignores as a joke and MacColl was
capable of being a fantastic lyricist with a very English sense of humour (so swearing,
sarcasm and smut then) who could do both word play and simple but effective as
good as those who’ve actually become known for their lyrical prowess like Elvis
Costello. She was also a very hot ginger woman, and I’m easily swayed by hot
ginger women. So are you sitting comfortably? Then BAY-AY-BEEE I’ll begin:

Free World(Kite, 1989)

I can’t decide if this or
Soho Square is my favourite Kirst MacColl song, I like them both and both for
their emotion but while Soho Square stays squarely in the realm of simple but
effective relying on delivery, Free World throws words at you like you’ve
offended their mother as our girl Kirsty gives a verbal smacking down to a
Thatcherite wanker who’s sold out his principals, his class and driven off his
friends, family and our heroine for the materialistic 80’s lifestyle. Kirsty
did this sort of lyric really well (so does her mate Billy Bragg); using a love
song as a protest song, drawing attention to some kind of other injustice while
also singing about some prick who clearly didn’t know he had it so good and
this is the best example of it from her, she fills the song with jabs at
Margaret Thatcher’s Britain from the very first line, which may well be one of
my favourites “I thought of you when they closed down the school / and the
hospital too / did they think that you were better / they were wrong” she could be just as easily
giving shit to the late great handbag herself. I guess the song works better if
you know a bit about the 1980s and how shit it was in the UK because of the
conservative government and the people who bought into their ‘pull the ladder up
Jack and sod the rest’ mentality but a whole chunk of it still works, I
especially like the enduring line ‘the ghettos are full of Mercedes Benz’ which
in a world still flooded with commercial rap is still horribly useful.

Can’t Stop Killing You(Titanic Days, 1994)

Kirsty MacColl tackles
abuse towards women, though she does it via a crime film filter which maybe
takes some of the impact out of things rather than if she put it in a domestic
setting like say, Alice Cooper’s Only Women Bleed or even Nickleback’s Never
Again (shhh, I like that song). It is however a very good little singalong
(well, long singalong, it’s four minutes long) allowing you to get really
worked up at the abusive bastard and his pathetic ‘I can’t help it, you deserve
it, it gives me no pleasure’ bullshit and it gets weirdly metaphorical in the
middle (when you’re swimming in the water / I’m the hadn that drags you under /
I’m the lighting that strikes you just before you hear the thunder’) that’s a
bit odd. Actually as much as I get out of this song I don’t think it may not be
on the same level as the ‘Soho Square’ or ‘England 2 Columbia 0’ it is however
something that needs to be sung about and it is good to sing it, thus raising
awareness without people knowing it’s doing that and thus it’s a good song, I
think that makes sense.

Queen of the High Teas(B-side w/ You Still Believe Me, 1981)

From abuse to neglect, and
one of MacColl’s overtly county and western arrangements (she had a few of
them, ‘Chip Shop was one, they were mostly very good, don’t be scared off by
the nasty C&W) here we have a couple who’ve settled down too quick, as
things grow more routine, more loveless and more unfulfilling the girl leaves,
so kind of imagine a Bruce Springsteen song but set in Croydon and way more
snappily written, also no one is called Mary (that I know of). The song takes
us down all the steps that lead to the woman leaving (anyhow) without really
out-and-out stating ‘this is why she’s leaving’ it’s just the situation growing
steadily more unfulfilling (I like that word) until it’s ‘too-ooooo late to
talk it over’. It’s not a long song and it’s jaunty despite being about
something rotten so it never outstays it’s welcome and its surprising
effectiveness makes up for it’s fairly unoriginal subject matter, my favourite
line:‘ They spend the night in silence watching rubbish on TV’ – no Bruce
Springsteen song could ever evoke boring domestic misery as well as that
line.

Tread Lightly(Kite, 1989)

Essentially the song is a
long way of saying ‘be careful what you wish for because it might just come
true’ or rather ‘tread lightly in your dreams, they might come true for you
tomorrow’ focussing mostly on disappointment in what I shall call a ‘driving
shuffle’ musically. I like songs about disappointment because my life seems to
be an endless stream of them (I know, I know, get the violins out) but the
reason it reaches this here list is its first verse with deals with the…complex
disappointment that comes with only inevitably achieving a boring domestic life
that despite being what we’re told to strive for and brings only boredom and a
feeling of underachievement, to wit “you’re happy with your 2.2 / what else is
there for you to do? / I turn and wet the baby’s head / and pray he will
happier than you or me”, oh and the great line ‘I try to stretch my mind / but
I just get my body wrecked’, I want that on a fucking car sticker.

Obligatory Cover Version:

Miss Otis Regrets(Galore, 1995, Kirsty MacColl with the Pogues)2

I think a lot of people
would have chosen her version of The Smiths’ ‘You Just Haven’t Earned it Yet,
Baby’ and the perverse part of me wants to recommend her… fascinating version
of Marty Robbins’ El Paso but fuck both of those – Miss Otis Regrets. Written
by Cole Porter and first performed by Douglas Byng in the revue ‘Hi Diddle
Diddle’ (Google is a wonderful thing) I…honestly don’t have much to say about
it, it’s a great performance of a song and Kirsty and London’s finest Irishmen
absolutely ‘make it their own’ (I hate that phrase but it’s utterly true here)
so thus it’s a great cover version. The song is has someone receiving a series
of messages as to why the obviously well-to-do woman Miss Otis cannot lunch
with them and each time it becomes more severe as we learn that Miss Otis had
an affair, shot the bastard when he dumped her and then got hung for the crime,
it’s paced brilliantly and Kirsty sounds genuinely sad as she tells Miss Otis’
tale.

England 2 Columbia 0(Tropical Brainstorm, 2000)

This is the sort of song
that convinces people someone’s a good lyricist, sadly it’s also from her
‘Cuban’ phase (she just fucking loved the place, Brazil too, lots of those sort
of places) so it has something of a world music feel to it and I understand
that can put someone off, one rarely listens to a heartbreak song and wants to
imagine castanets but by god give this one a chance, it’s so funny and so well
written and has been arranged so the vocals fit the rhumba perfectly, and
there’s something rather nice about the contrast of such an English song and
story and such an un-English soundtrack. So what’s it about? Well it’s about
that time Kirsty went on a date to watch a football match (between England and
Columbia) only to find out – from her date’s friend – that he was married with
three kids. What a cunt. So Kirsty deals with it in a very English way – by
being pissed off but very funny at the same time; reaching its pinnacle with
the outburst “ok so I didn’t mention my kids / I thought I’d wait a bit / but I
am free and single / and he’s a lying git!”. That makes me smile every time, I
can just picture her standing and pointing, shouting that and then cracking up
despite her tears with her friend (in Sal Palo). It’s so relatable (well not if
you’re American, but you’re all imaginary so for this paragraph you’re all from
Croydon) and a nice change in that it’s very much a song about an adult woman
with kids rather than a mythical trendy 20-something like most songs seem to be
about so they can appeal to as many lowest common denominators as possible but
Kirsty’s use of everyday language and a natural speech pattern does more than
that sort of wish-washy-jack-of-all-trades-actually-says-nothing-and-defeats-its-own-purpose-horseshit
ever could.

Soho Square(Titanic Days, 1994)

I love this song so much
but I think it’s a song you have to listen to, lyrically it could be considered
quite simple (though not, y’know, Ramone simple) it is, in summary, about being
stood up in the cold on a bench in Soho Square (a real location just off of
Oxford Street) but still wanting the person anyway and is just her thoughts on
the matter as she waits there, and then after the fact where she dreams that one
day the person’ll be waiting there, in fact it ‘reads’ just like a person’s
thought process, not disjointed or stream of thought, just like what you think
to yourself as you’re waiting or doing something. Musically it keeps this same
sense of feeling exactly like something, somehow sounding cold and sad and then
cold and wistful (there’s some tinkling somewhere) I wonder how people do that?
Make something sound like something that has no sound, a feeling, a
temperature, a ginger bird sitting between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford
Street? It’s very clever and very much on show here. It also has a good
selection of cutting lines seemingly thrown in just to make you feel something
(it’s very inconvenient when you’re on the bus) things like ‘I know I’m not too
old to cry’ and ‘I don’t mind loneliness that much’ and ‘do we always have to
be sorry / why can’t we just be happy baby?’- it’s all the sort of defeated lines
you think to yourself after you’ve been blown out – and the happy fantasy as
the end just finishes me off, this song has been known to make cry (which is
very inconvenient on the bus). Again though I think it only works when listened
too. Also after MacColl’s very untimely death they put a bench in Soho Square
for her because of this song and yes I have sat on it and played Soho Square3.

Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim!(Kite, 1989)

This kind of has the same
issue as England 2 Columbia 0 in that it’s a shining example of what a
fantastic lyricist MacColl was but musically it seems designed to put the cool kids
off – this time it’s the dreaded Country and Western rearing its head again,
still at least it’s thematic here. As well as being greatly amusing it’s also
very touching, you see the problem I have with people and There’s A Guy Works
Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis is that they focus on the silly title and
miss the point of the song, which is the lines that come after it – ‘he’s a
liar and I’m not sure about you’ it’s just one of the many instances of Kirsty
putting a creative spin on a love song and so is 'Cowboy, but again the few
people who remember this song (it was a single) remember it’s amusing hook
(it’s a slightly archaic way of saying ‘don’t pretend to be a player, pal’) and
miss that the song is being sung to someone who isn’t a cowboy, who isn’t the
funny stories in the verses, again the important line is the one that comes
after the tittersome title – ‘I know lots of those and you’re not one of them /
there’s a light in your eyes tells me somebody’s in’, it’s someone saying ‘I
know you’re a good person’, that’s pretty sweet and by doing it in a funny way,
pretty realistic too, as touching as I’m sure Words Don’t Come Easily or
something is it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever have someone burst into poetic
verse like that at you4, Kirsty’s way’s a lot more likely. Anyway, the humour, the verses include
descriptions of some of the sort of cowboys the person the song is for is most
certainly not, sized up with ball-shrivelling accuracy and wit by the One and
Only here and each featuring a funny line of which ‘the boots just go back on
the socks that have stayed on’ is still the king. On the ‘I want that on a car
sticker’ this one also features the line ‘I fell out of favour with heaven
somewhere and I’m here for the hell of it now’, ooh, speaking of which…

Closer to God(B-side w/ Free World, 1989)

Ok I don’t have a problem
with religion or someone holding religious beliefs that I do not and I don’t
have an issue with the big G-O-D, I have an issue with how some people use
religion to justify and excuse their poor behaviour (and those people who
invade my personal space to shout at me on the high street about the word of
god, though that could well be the same thing), it seems Ma’am MacColl feels
the same way, or at least she did on this song, I’m also quite annoyed at
myself that so many of these picks are from the Kite era. This song is about a
hypocrite who uses his religion to allow him to feel superior, he has been a
complete bastard to our Kirsty but still has the cheek to say he adheres to a
religion that is all about being kind to you fellow man and it is deliciously
nasty ‘are you closer to God than the folks you despise’ and ‘when you get to
those gates will your ‘friend’ come as well’ are just in the chorus! But the winner
is ‘does the lord keep you warm in her bed every night? / are your prayers in
the morning just squeals of delight’. I tell you what; do you listen to Alanis
Morissette? No? You probably hate her and want to make a joke about Ironic?
Well Ironic is a shit song, but you should listen to some of her other stuff
even if it’s just You Oughta Know so you can titter at the blowjob reference
because if it has the same effect on you as it does on me it will fucking shame you into not being a dick to
women, Kirsty MacColl has a bit of that going on sometimes and 'Cowboy and
Closer to God are two of those times, it’s a good thing, it shows you what you
don’t want to see so you can learn it’s wrong.

Halloween(Electric
Landlady, 1991)

This was going to be ‘In
These Shoes?’ a fun song along the lines of ‘Chip Shop and Cowboy’ but then I
realised I hadn’t included a song from Electric Landlady and that’s a fucking
great album. Halloween’s another ‘simple (but not as simple as The Ramones) but
effective’ lyric but it has such a great feel to it you should give it a go,
it’s not really about Halloween it’s just using it as a metaphor for how
spookily right for her some bloke is and it’s music evokes more magic and
wonder than ghosts ‘n’ goblins but, well, it’s just really a nice song to
listen to, it’s catchy without being irritating and it’s actually the song I
sing the most during the Halloween season, it just gets stuck in me head,
there’s this bit that goes ‘ hal-oh, hal-oh, HAAA-loween’ and every time I see
the words ‘Halloween’ for about the first week of the season I sing that, it’s
quite annoying really, but it is from a
good song, take my word for it.

Runners-up:

Caroline (Galore,
1995) about the complexities and conflicting emotions of being called on to
comfort your best friend when it was secretly you he left her for (oops); In These Shoes? (Tropical Brainstorm,
2000) which is a nice(?) way of saying ’let’s not be silly’ to chat up lines; Bad (Titanic Days, 1994) – I’ve been
the token woman all my life / the token daughter and the token wife / now I
collected tokens one by one / ‘til I’ve saved enough to buy a gun; What do Pretty Girls Do? (Kite, 1989) –
they get old like everyone else and We’ll
Never Pass This Way Again (Electric Landlady, 1991) which is about cutting
your losses and not ruining what you have/had and didn’t make the list because
it fucking bums me out.

And that’s your lot, I’m
not putting youtube links up for these articles because those sort of videos
tend to get taken down quickly and I hate finding a blog post with broken
links. Sadly Kirsty MacColl was killed in 2000 while diving off the coast of
Mexico at the Chankanaab reef, which is part of a national park and a
designated diving area where boats are restricted from entering, but if you’re
multimillionaire president of a Mexican supermarket chain such bullshit is for
other people and she was killed by his boat while saving her teenage son because Kirty MacCooll is AWESOME. The
prick (Guillermo González Nova) paid one of his manservants – allegedly - to
take the fall and say he was driving and said manservant paid £61 to stay out
of jail, and a couple of thousand dollars to Kirsty MacColl’s family, two grand
being the going rate for a mother at the time I guess. I (and many others)
remained sore about this as you can tell. Her last album of original material
was Tropical Brainstorm (it’s very good) and her last single was a new version
of Sun on the Water, released to promote her box set (which is even better).
I’m not saying she didn’t release a few stinkers but overall her body of work
is very strong and you should all check it out my fictional chums, and now you can go
to hell – I’m going to Brazil.

1
The Pogues originally featured a female member, Cait O’Riordan, but she left to
shag Elvis Costello so Kirsty ended up getting the job because her then-husband
was producing the recording session, The Pogues and Kirsty ended up being very
good friends and they were a big part of the Justice for Kirsty campaign.

2 The
song was originally released as a Single (A-Side) in 1990 to promote the Red
Hot & Blue AIDS benefit compilation (which it featured on) but on all other releases it was part of a medley with Just One of Those Things (another Cole
Porter song), however it was edited for the Galore compilation to be a
standalone track, as I loathe medleys and love this song and this version of
this song I thus included that version on this list.

3
not to be childish (ha!) but it also really does sound like she says ‘the
pigeons shit in the naked trees’ rather than ‘shiver in the naked trees’ it’s
often only that piece of silliness that keeps me from bawling on the bus.

4
the excellent book Crap Lyrics (Johnny Sharp, 2009, buy it now) also makes the
point that many of these big love songs actually wouldn’t get a very good
response in real life, my favourite is still ‘If I said you had a beautiful
body would you hold it against me’ which is just asking to get you slapped but
that book uses the example of ‘whatever I said / whatever I did / I didn’t mean
it’ from Want You Back For Good which it correctly points out would get you in
more shit for not even knowing what you did (and for quoting Take That).